Tom Zoellner - The National Road: Dispatches From a Changing America

Praise for The National Road

A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice

The National Road is a chronicle of Zoellners wanderings and wanderlust... Its also a sneakily ambitious book whose 13 dispatches present a sweeping view of the American land and its inhabitantshow each has shaped, and deformed, the other... Zoellner is a superb reporter and a deep thinker, with a command of the centuries-long back story... The nations splendor and depravity may be irreconcilable; its mysteries may be insoluble. But for Zoellner and other restless voyagers, there is still so much America out there if you point your wheels in the right direction.

Jody Rosen, The New York Times Book Review

A fascinating investigation into American places and themes; metaphors for our country... Zoellner sums up America as a country of destruction and reinvention where the scythe sits on the table next to the blue-print... The National Road is an enthralling journey that proves his point.

Martha Anne Toll, NPR

Zoellner exposes naivet, foolishness, and malfeasance with equal clarity, but he is evenhanded and sometimes produces a piece of sardonic humor, haunting beauty, or melancholy that pulsates on the page. He is both a first-rate reporter with years of newspaper and magazine work behind him and a skilled stylist who makes you want to come back for more.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A poignant collection of essays about American identity.

Outside

Tom Zoellner is one of my go-to authors. He has a clear eye, a deep soul, and a very sharp pen.

Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devils Highway

The National Road may be the perfect guidebook for a tour of the U.S. geographical and social landscape right now. It skips the political muck of the moment and takes us deep into the root systems of our knotty, bewildering, often-exasperating yet reliably awe-inspiring country.

Meghan Daum, author of The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars

Tom Zoellners brilliant essays are insightful meditations on the roads hes traveled, a gift to readers who will see the United States anew. In his hands, small towns, big cities, landmarks, and personal landscapes tell the stories that we need to know and remember, stories that only a talent like Zoellner can unveil.

Dana Johnson, author of In the Not Quite Dark

Tom Zoellners Grand Tour of our fractured, uneasy United States reads simultaneously like an elegy for what was and an ode for whats ahead. Beautiful, smart, and ultimately comforting.

Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

The close-up realities of the United States have always been contra-dictory, and compelling. Heartless, but also generous. Ridiculous, but also noble. Strongly similar across the nation, but also sharply different region-by-region. In The National Road, Tom Zoellner does a wonderful job of perceiving, describing, and making sense of the contradictions of this stage of national life. I learned a lot about the country through this journey, and enjoyed making the trip with an observant and open-hearted guide.

James Fallows, author of Our Towns

Casinos and atom bombs, real estate and porn movies, small-town corruption, big-city strivers, Mormon martyrs, and so much more get rolled into the pages of this questing and questioning big-hearted book. To get where we're going, we need to know where we've gone, and Tom Zoellner is the best guide for our times that I know of.

Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynns Long Halftime Walk

ALSO BY TOM ZOELLNER

The Heartless Stone
Uranium

A Safeway in Arizona
Train

Island on Fire

The National Road

Copyright 2020 by Tom Zoellner

First hardcover edition: 2020

First paperback edition: 2021

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Names: Zoellner, Tom, author.

Title: The national road : dispatches from a changing America / Tom Zoellner.

Description: Berkeley : Counterpoint Press, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020001055 | ISBN 9781640092907 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781640092914 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: RoadsUnited States. | United StatesEconomic conditions21st century. | United StatesSocial conditions21st century. | Migration, InternalUnited States. | United StatesSocial life and customs21st century. | Social changeUnited States.

Classification: LCC HE355 .Z64 2020 | DDC 973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001055

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64009-493-2

Cover design by Donna Cheng

Book design by Jordan Koluch

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will
tell you who you are.

JOS ORTEGA Y GASSET

Contents

A summer afternoon in Kansas: shadows in the grass, and a diagonal slash cut into the earth.

The trench in the soil had nailed me in place, as if I had just been shown the ribs of a dinosaur skeleton. Nothing here but a rut in the ground, but what a remarkable rut, because it had been carved here by hundreds of wagons traveling on the Santa Fe Trail in the mid-nineteenth century, jangling with goods headed southwest, crossing through territory of the Pawnee and Kiowa. The ground still wore a scar of their passage. I could not have been more mesmerized looking at a full-color telescope blast of the Crab Nebula, or at the dark shroud of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

An eccentric idea took root that afternoon at the side of this Kansas highway, though it would take a few more years to fully materialize. When I grew restless with a newspaper job and looked for an excuse to get away, I remembered that slash in the ground from the Santa Fe Trail. Could I follow its path on foot? Missouri to New Mexico: nine hundred miles chasing the ghosts of wagons. A few months later, I had forty pounds of gear on my back on a dirt road on a ridge near Little Wakarusa Creek on the path of the old wagon trail.

Green stubbles of wheat poked upward from nearby fields; farther away, I could see horses grazing in a pasture, nickering to one another. And as the ridge rose farther, it came to one of those crests so common in eastern Kansas that opens a broad vista of prairie that has the illusion of limitlessness. A cloudbank shredded the afternoon sun into lace, pouring light down on all the miles flowing westward, promising something unseen over the edgea Denver, a Santa Fe, a Pacific Ocean. Land wedded to a democratic ideal.

How was it possible, I wondered, that all of this American landin every directioncould be fastened together into a whole? How could all those unseen cities, all those drab little towns, all those races and languages, all those hundreds of millions of flawed human beings with vastly different stories and troubles be kept hanging together in a consensus that centered around nothing more than a four-page rulebook and a set of disputed principles that we argued about before the Santa Fe Trail was there and long after it disappeared? What are the enduring features that make us Americans?